I used to be hard-core into cars. I loved driving. Traffic, staggeringly bad insurance, and idiotic driving have largely soured me on driving. Yes, I will always have a car so I can get out to the great outdoors, but I have largely stopped driving in urban environments. The bike, bus, and train are faster, cheaper, or straight up easier than fighting an hour+ through traffic to go to a fun venue nine miles away.

Nowadays, I vote gleefully for everything that improves mass transit, bike infrastructure, and third places. There’s an incredible knock-on effect with traffic reduction. The more bus rapid transit lanes, the more comprehensive the rail network, and the larger and safer the bike lanes become, the faster it is to get around the city- even if one or more options is out of commission due to highway construction or tunnel repairs. A decade ago, I sat in gridlock traffic for three hours to go two city blocks. These days, I can get across town on bike in 26 minutes. Traffic is down- it only takes about an hour to cross the city.

Western US. You don’t want it, though. It’s all the crappy $40 tents and stuff.

We have the same problem here in the US. Camping areas have blown up on Tik Tok, and people leave whole tents and other massive garbage. There’s not enough park rangers to staunch the flow of waste and illegal camping. It’s damaging lakes when people toss their camping gear into it.

They do, but only because most platforms suck ass. Logging into Origin or Microsoft stores is miserable, and social integration is rare, or broken AF. If everything was cross platform, cross play, and universal social profiles and security, I’m fine with multiple platforms.

I savescum because there are too many games where not doing something perfectly means you go from one difficult to get ending to the ending that 80% of people will get.

BG3 is unfortunately a really great example of this, where one roll can cost you your SO and their destiny.

Silksong winning GOTY and BGYSA is great. Seeing Peak up there was nice too. I was a little surprised to see BG3- great game, but I thought it was EOLed in 2024 after native steam deck support.

It’s also needed for their HOTAS line, but considering it has sliders, toggles, buttons and yaw, I kind of understand why. It also allows you to bind sliders to keys and such (eg, binding a slider to landing gear)

Ehhh, it’s still a thing. I had burn in on my S9, and I babied that thing explicitly to prevent burn in. And that was after 4-5 years. My desktop monitors are nearly a decade old starting next year (wow, 1440p still has amazing staying power).

I’d definitely worry about burn-in if you have Teams open for nine hours a day and the taskbar on. It’s crazy to me that phones still burn in from casual use. :/

I paid $65 bucks for 32gb ddr4 3600mhz around 2020. Crazy to see ram prices now.

Rise of Nations: Gold Edition (2003).

The controls are ancient, but the gameplay and music still holds up.

Just a heads up, you can also freeze fresh spinach in the freezer for smoothies! It keeps pretty well because it freezes into individual “chips” that don’t stick together unless it thaws. It’s excellent if you’d usually be throwing away spinach that was going to go bad. I recommend buying and freezing a large portion immediately in a freezer bag, just so it doesn’t get mushy in your fridge.

Oh no, I meant Melina. Though Usha needs to find a better guy. Good lord, haha.

The president married an immigrant too, lol.

I have the moto g stylus 2024, and can confirm, it’s a great phone.

If it’s a screen door problem, it means they had to cut costs somewhere. Adding in a battery, SoC, networking + wifi dongle isn’t cheap at all. Adding tracking cameras isn’t cheap either. Redesigning controllers and switching them to optical ain’t cheap. And all that, coming in at less than an index system’s launch price, with tariffs on top. I think that’s just the price you pay for Questifying the index.

Personally, I’m really bummed out that they added in a bunch of mobile crap that will swiftly become outdated within five years. The benefit of the Index was that, aside from hardware becoming worn down, all the processing was offloaded to the computer’s GPU, so buying a new GPU could instantly raise the bar for graphics and framerate for years to come.

Give me an Index 2 with high res screens that are stupidly high refresh rate, even higher resolution motion tracking, and optional wireless accessories.

What if you just didn’t go home at first? Hit a climbing gym with buddies, or buy an ebike and use that to commute home. Interrupting your normal schedule and psychologically making home only a place of rest might help you reset your life a bit.

You don’t have to spend money either. You could even just hit up a park, the library, or hang out with buddies. We tend to go swimming lots once standard time hits.

I usually use something bleach-based for toilet and sinks, as they can start to get funky, especially around tile. Sometimes a bleach powder for the tub bottom, if it gets dirty and is difficult to scrub with simple green. I sometimes swap between simple green and bleach-based, depending on what I’m wearing. I’ve destroyed multiple pieces of clothing with bleach, unfortunately. It does really clean dirty things easily, though.

Also, alcohol wipes can clean walls, if they start to get dirty (eg, bug droppings, pollen, etc. we keep our windows open in summer)

Thank you for your sacrifice. The same thing happens to me at my bus stop whenever I open my umbrella on a rainy day. The bus arrives as soon as I open it.

Don’t forget the steep tariffs!

If you carve out a tunnel into the floor and have the entrance down a foot or two, the wind can’t blow directly in, and the cold air will sink to fill the tunnel/entrance with your sleeping platform being quite warm.